Planning or Pantsing

It's hard to write when I think about a disease so aggressive it springs up in the midst of treatment.  I hate that some of the most shining lights among my friends are going through the same, similar, or worse.  It scares me how fast I went downhill and how fast it could happen again.  I feel like I can't plan ahead.  I always knew I wasn't meant to have kids or a house or whatever else normal people do but I'm still jealous (99% happy for them, of course, but that 1%) that they can plan.  They can get married, have kids, get divorced, get remarried and build a garden.  I knew I wouldn't make a lot of money so I didn't need the house, it didn't matter that I couldn't afford kids.  But I thought my alternative was going to be saving up for hot springs tours of Japan, book tours in Callie's van, and the best dog ever.

I don't really know what direction to go in though.  Pantsing means a day at a time, massages and cookies.  But if I'm going to get published I need to finish some books.  But books involve planning, involve *time* and I don't know how much of that I have.  Aggression doesn't bode well for treatment or for recurrance and I'm only 27, that's like starting the game with 8 points against you.

I need to prioritize.  The dog is most important.  Is that weird?  I didn't think it would be first, I mean I've managed for years without one but if all I have is tomorrow, I want my dog at my side.  I know I should be concerned for my health and infection potential and blah blah blah.  FINE, I'll wear a kevlar bubble if I have to!  My MENTAL health is important too yaknow!

It's midnight.  My chemo today had crack in it!

I don't know what's next.  I guess I do take that a day at a time.  Maybe I'll write tomorrow.  Maybe I won't.  

I've been having trouble the last couple days but I'll get over it.  It's not worth losing a day to being upset about the future and I'm so, so lucky.  I can *walk*….I'm not paralyzed, I'm not in the hospital, I can breathe, I can sing, aside from my shoulder I'm not in pain…..my quality of life is pretty damn good right now.  So right now, I'm happy.  I can't ruin that with worry even if it does mean I give myself short term memory and can't plan anything.

Also, I watched Troop Beverly Hills which is just as hilarious now as it was when I was ten (unlike Grease which I couldn't watch ten minutes of haha)

PS. My white count is low so I have to get HORRIBLE BURNING NEEDLES all week.  But I'm not getting one now.  SO YAY.  

Don’t Write Every Day

Several writers have told me that the way to succeed is to write every day, no matter what.  I took that to heart, blocked out the sun and typed even as my fingers bled.  You know what?  It's bullshit.

Write often.  Losing a day can turn into a week, a month, a year.  If you're meant to write, you'll come back to it.  You'll need to.  Any time I feel bored or depressed, I realize it's because  I haven't been writing as often as I need to.  Taking a break is not going to sabotage my way to a career.  If it did, then I wasn't meant to be a career writer at all.

Don't sacrifice your life to the alter of writing, to the god of a publishing industry that is no more, and no less, than a business.

Throw the laptop out the window and jump out there with it.  Into the wild, into life.

How can you describe a tree without touching it, smelling it, climbing it?

How can the morgue tunnels under the city inspire you, if you don't know they exist?

I haven't written anything in about a month.  My brain isn't  even churning ideas and this "you must write every day" lie torments me.  But I'm putting my foot down.  I'm coughing up my stomach, exhausted, and it hurts to be in any position but lying down.  This is my proclamation to myself and to those of you who push yourselves too hard:  it's okay for a first draft to suck.  It's okay NOT to write.  

Dream: I read Twilight?!

Buffy rocked the teen girl X bad boy vampire story.  As much as it can be rocked anyway.  I'm not big on vampires and after some real life experience I am so over bad boys.  But it was funny.  When I first heard about Twilight, I thought 'eh, just not my thing' so I haven't read it.  

Until last night.

I dreamed that I read through Twilight in a single evening.  The depth and layers of tension impressed me.  I didn't like it any more than I thought I would, but I appreciated the writing.  

Now that the book has become the instigator to mass hysteria and the writing career dreams are made of, I guess feel like I ought to analyze it to discover The Secrets.

A book on the shelf is not a guarantee nor is rejection the end

The news that 7th Son:  Deceit won't be in book stores hit me hard.  I've spent years of writing and hard revision on Lightning Spliced.  I know many authors don't get their first book published, or even their second.  I've come to accept that challenge–feed off it, even.  But the thought of being a published author with two books under my belt, with the name recognition that comes from articles in the NY Times and Publisher's weekly….then being denied anyway?  That has me staring at Mt. Everest with broken gear.

I understand the financial rationale and that  makes me all the more grateful for e-books and podcasting.  7th Son: Descent was more set up than anything, the story takes off with Deceit.  I'm thankful that this story was not buried under the bed, that I got to enjoy it and so did thousands of other people.  

I'm the kind of person that hopes for the best but prepares for the worst.  Of course, I'm determined to find an agent and then publisher for Lightning Spliced.  I'm confident that it's a marketable novel that avoids the mistakes of Heroes' later convoluted seasons.  But I know there's a possibility that industry professionals won't agree.  I will refuse that death knell.  I've worked too hard to accept that.  One way or another, my novel will find its audience.  

When Tension’s on a Bagel…!

Tension in the morning
tension in the evening
tension at suppertime
when tension's in your novel
you will make scenes rock every time

Words pour from my fingers when I escalate that delicious conflict :D  When my brain clogs up, it's usually because I haven't devised enough natural tension so I'm either writing boring scenes or forcing friction on unmotivated characters.  That's what dancing is for!  

Yes, I actually like writer's block. It makes me exercise!
 

Top 5 villains who haunt my nightmares

Writing books tell me I'm supposed to like the three-dimensional antagonist who is just a reflection of myself, who is justified, blah, blah, blah.  And I do enjoy the depth of those like Zach's father in Personal Effects:  Dark Art.

But my very favorite villains are psychos all the way!  I love quirky bad guys with a method to their madness that makes sense to them if not to anyone else.  I want them to be passionately motivated \with varying levels of emotion.  I like a villain with sense of humor, that bit of humanity wrapped in evil chills me.

Sylar - from Heroes.  omg this guy puts a face to the bogeyman under my bed.  All he wants to do is figure out how things work….an innocent enough pursuit for a nice enough guy.  Until he graduates from dissecting watches to dissecting brains.  Aside from ripping abilities out of people's minds, he has no interest in hurting anyone.  It's just an unfortunate side effect of the process.  Unless they get in his way, which of course they do, and then he has no choice.  I like this idea of a villain 'forced' into his villainous actions.

Dread - from Otherland by Tad Williams.  This guy constantly has a song in his head, usually classical music.  There's something very disturbing about a man who kills not out of anger, but with serenity.  He's specific about his violence, not one of those bad guys who tries to make it into the Guinness Book of Law-Breaking.  He has zero interest in being a sexual deviant, finds it disgusting.

The Joker - primarily the incarnation from The Dark Knight.  He's dedicated to the challenge of anarchy.  He's gleeful about destruction and his stories about his past contradict each other so you don't really know why he is the way he is…maybe there's a hint of truth in all of them, or maybe he had a perfectly well-adjusted childhood and is just rationalising why he is how he is.  One of the most interesting moments with him is when he says that he would never want to kill Batman, despite how much he seems to try.  Batman is his companion in freakdom and the challenge that keeps him stimulated.

The Dark Man - from Personal Effects:  Dark Art.  I've never been terrified by an elusive 'dark presense' before but wow.  I love the hints of madness and how the protag fails to maintain his sanity in the face of the abnormal.  

Zcythe - from Lightning Spliced.  Okay, okay, she's my own villain but I had to get a female up here.  This girl loves killing people because she thinks it's fashionable from her custom knives to the skull clips in her pigtails. She's so happy-go-lucky I can't help but want to hang out with her.

One thing these villains all have in common is that they are far stronger than the protags that fight them.  Just when the protag thinks they've got the antag cornered (Joker's in jail), all hell breaks loose.  The antags push the protags to the edge–off it–buildings explode, people die, drama ensues!

Motivational strategies

Over on the Chimera Critiques forum, Callie reminded me of a meeting we had where we discussed how to deal with feeling overwhelmed.  Below are the tips I suggested:

Market Length / Word count by genres

Thanks to literary agent Colleen Lindsay, we've got a nice chart of expected word count by genres.  And here's another from Book Ends, LLC by Jessica Faust.  It's pretty much in line with what I've read here and there over the last few years.  Once in a while, you hear of exceptions that something can be much shorter or much longer or even that the  "standard" is much longer.  

When I queried originally, the book was 125K and rejected across the board (of course, my query could have just sucked).  I believe J.C. Hutchins said his book was 130K when he queried, later mentioned that was way too long to be published and I have every confidence in the rest of his query writing skills just cause he's brilliant.

I'm aiming for 85,000 with LIGHTNING SPLICED.  (Currently 2/3rds through a last read-through with an aim to query late January so as not to add to the holiday rush ;)  I'm at 88,100) 

Given the maturity and age range of the characters, it could be marketed as either YA or adult so that count is not too long, not too short.  I originally was aiming for adult because I'd never read YA, I literally went from reading picture books and a few middle grades to reading adult fiction (hehe..Little Women and Star Trek novels, what a combo).  Now that I've been digging into YA more, I'm liking it and THE DEEP WITHIN will definitely be in that category.  The next one will be more hazy about the genres.  I really like that mid-twenties range.

Here are some additional guidelines provided by Jess, the head of Southern-Fried SpecFic in Savannah:

 Epic: A work of 200,000 words or more.
Novel: A work of 40,000 words or more (most modern novels go less than 90,000 words)
Novella: A work of at least 17,500 words but under 40,000 words.
Novelette: A work of at least 7,500 words but under 17,500 words.
Short story: A work of at least 1,000 words but under 7,500 words.
Flash fiction: A work of less than 1,000 words (some, particularly pro markets, put this at 500 words.)
 

Just for fun, Jenny Rappaport and her reasons for rejecting queries that day.

Letting go of the Prologue

In the Breakout Novel Workbook, Maass mentions that a prologue or flashfoward at the start is a red flag that the author doesn’t have confidence in their first chapter. My first chapter has had the worst growing pains. I always had problems with it and everyone who read it had problems with it. So I wrote up a prologue that starts with Nighthawk (the guy who seems to be almost everyone’s favorite ;) ). And I know it was because I wasn’t confident in my first chapter.

But I was feeling good about some changes I made recently so coming to the critique meeting was awesome — to hear those specific changes pointed out as A+ and that it was really hard to find anything to critique. What helps more is that we found a solution to something that has been bugging me and it solves a few problems I didn’t even notice in addition to that! With that in place, I feel that not only is the prologue unnecessary but its a hindrance. It’s getting in the way of starting the story with the main character, it’s getting in the way chronologically, and reveals too much too soon.

Proud moment :D

The Step by Step Guide to Writing a Novel that Kicks Ass

“Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook” by Donald Maass. Get it. Love it. Live it.

Practical, effective, explains the reasons behind the do/don’ts to help you avoid not only common beginner mistakes but really polish what you’ve got to make it thrilling and meaningful.

My only issue with it was that I didn’t always agree that the examples were effective because some of the examples didn’t follow his own advice! He mentions being specific but in his pitch example he has vague “dangerous cargo” and something like ‘must make an important decision.’ Same with the first line/last line list… I thought it was a trick question, that he was giving ineffective lines and on the next page he would show some ways to transform them because I found them average at best. Admittedly, none were specificly sci-fi/fantasy and I’m a hugely biased geek for those genres so it may just be me. Still, I went to the bestseller shelf a few weeks ago, only a few were my genre, read the first paragraph of every book, was was much more captivated by what was there.

Additional writing resources

“The Fire in Fiction” by Donald Maass. An excellent guide to building tension, with (mostly) practical prompts at the end of each chapter. This is more than just a ‘do/don’t’ book. He shows you what works, explains why it works, and then goes a step further to show how and why breaking the rules can work equally well.

Absolute Write - This bottomless writing resource includes a plethora of articles in addition to a forum frequented by writers of all shapes and sizes (bestselling novelists, newbie screenwriters, freelancers, variety of genres).

A place to find competant beta readers and get your own reading material as well. I’ve found some seriously grade A stories, diamonds in the rough just needing some editing to make them shine…can’t wait to see them on the shelves (:

My writing ability has skyrocketed since critiqueing others. There’s just something about seeing ineffective techniques in someone else’s work that really clarifies them in your own. I had no idea how redundant I was being nor how confusing my fruit basket of characters was. It’s amazing to see someone’s work brighten as they edit…now it can be frustrating to read books from the library because I can’t tell the author how I feel or what I think might work better ;p

Plus it’s just nice to come to a community of writers after spending hours locked to no one but the keyboard.

Then there are, of course, good ol’ writing classes and workshops. I have to thank my English degree for something ;)